Question

How do I delete the first instance of a substring in another string with PHP? Thanks.

Answer 1

Something like this may do the trick.

function replaceFirst($input, $search, $replacement){
    $pos = stripos($input, $search);
    if($pos === false){
        return $input;
    }
    else{
        $result = substr_replace($input, $replacement, $pos, strlen($search));
        return $result;
    }
}

$input = "This is a test. This is only a test.";
$search = "test";
echo replaceFirst($input, $search, "replaced!");
// "This is a replaced!. This is only a test."

Sorry for all the edits, had some weird formatting issues.